For what it's worth, I spent the first ten years I was drawing as a regular hobby doing so digitally - at least, onwards from the age of 14 when I was able to get my first tablet. I improved plenty, but I had a ton of holes in my fundamentals, and so what I was producing was still very inconsistent.

When I finally pursued more formal training at the age of 24, which constituted of saving up money from my full time job, quitting, and moving across the continent to take two terms of Concept Design Academy, the first term was entirely focused on traditional work. While I expect the fact that I had a lot more experience in drawing by that point (12ish years to your 4 months), adapting to the change in medium was not easy. Where digital tools allowed me to hide a lot of my issues, the ink we were working with - as we do so here - highlighted every mistake and made it impossible to hide.

That's why we use it. If your goal is to improve your skills (which it doesn't have to be - there is nothing that says we have to strive to improve on a technical level with the things we do as a hobby, although many don't really approach it in the sense of a "pure" hobby, in which case your technical skills wouldn't matter), then that is done by being made to face our mistakes. Not to fear or hate them, but to recognize their value in telling us (or more accurately, those helping us out) what issues we still face, and what we should do next to tackle them.

I still do just about all of my artwork digitally, but focusing on traditional tools in that first term armed me with a foundation and basis that fed back into my digital work. Changing mediums will always have its troubles, as one has to learn the ins and outs of that specific medium. Each piece of software has its particular ways of doing things, just as a brush, a pencil, a fineliner, a fountain pen, a ballpoint pen will all have different considerations and issues for us to grow accustomed to accounting for. But that is not the entirety of what you're learning - that is just the smallest piece of it.

What you learn about drawing, about leveraging your arm and your body, about understanding the things you draw on a flat page or canvas as existing in three dimensions - these exist entirely separately from the tools you happen to be using at the time. But every concept you learn is going to have tools that work against their principles, and tools that work with those principles to help teach the concept more effectively.

And that is why working with ink is something we recommend when working through this course, and why using digital tools for what we learn here isn't.

I don't get it. Do you always have your pc readily available? Don't you have moments where you could have doodled but you don't have access to your pc? I thought every digital artist carried pen and paper to doodle in those moments.